In August 2019, CoinFLEX launched a new incentive program for market makers after closing a $10 million fundraising round with VC firms Polychain, NGC Ventures, Fenbushi, and Struck Capital. CoinFLEX launched this program, which offered rebates of $250,000 in total to the firms trading on the platform, in the hope of increasing its daily trade volumes of XBT/USDT (bitcoin to Tether futures) to $500 million. At the time that the news broke, three firms had signed up, and CoinFLEX was aiming to sign up seven more market makers.[3]

Products and Services

According to CEO Mark Lamb, physically-settled cryptocurrency futures require that when one of these futures contracts expires, the underlying cryptocurrency rather than a cash payment is transferred to the contract buyer, as is the case with bitcoin futures contracts offered the CME Group. Traders who are short the contract at expiration deliver a cryptocurrency and receive Tether, a stablecoin whose value is designed to track the U.S. dollar.[5]

In August 2019, Lamb told The Block that the platform was looking to roll out futures tied to Bitfinex's LEO token, as well as Binance Coin (BNB) and TRON's TRX token.[7][8]

"Initial futures offering"

CoinFLEX introduced a physically-delivered futures contract product for Polkadot (DOT), a blockchain interoperability project that had yet to launch, on July 17, 2019. According to Lamb, DOT's token market was "extremely illiquid," "entirely dark," and has "zero transparency." CoinFLEX closed a private sale of 500,000 DOT as part of an "IFO," or initial futures offering, which was reportedly valued at $1.2 billion. Lamb told The Block that CoinFLEX wants to improve the problems of illiquidity and lack of transparency in such token sales, which he said are "over-margined on the short side." He said that offering futures contracts protects buyers by allowing them to trade at fixed prices in the event that the price moons, while CoinFLEX collects extra funds from the seller to protect them from defaulting.[9]

On August 22, 2019, CoinFLEX launched deliverable futures on DFINITY, a coin for a cloud services platform.[10]

On October 7, 2019, Lamb told Bloomberg that CoinFLEX would list a deliverable futures contract on Facebook's Libra, which itself had no specific launch date at the time. CoinFLEX plans to launch trading in the its first Libra futures contract, December 2020, on October 24, 2019, more than a year ahead of time. Lamb said that the contract will not only allow people to price the cryptocurrency ahead of time, but it will also be a wager on whether Libra will launch by the end of the next year as scheduled. The closer the futures price is to zero, the more the market believes Libra will not launch.[11]